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The Riakunna: Walking Together Collective invites truth-telling and a deep connection with Country trough sharing stories, music, and art.

​ These are journeys of recognising and healing stories of Country, and exploring your own earth-based connection.
​
Riakunna is a palawa word translating as "creek/song" or "singing up a creek".

The Collective
We have collaborated on several projects, including "Growing Awara" Circles, Work that Reconnects Workshops, and truth-telling circles. 
Moran Wiesel is an ecotherapist, musician, and facilitator. They have extensive experience creating safe, supportive environments to enter into deep earth-based connection, and in guiding eco-based meditations. Most recently they have co-founded the Work that Reconnects, Deep Ecology, and Active Hope, Network Tasmania, offering weekend and day-long forest immersion workshops. As a harpist/flautist they offer earth-based meditative sound baths around nipaluna/Hobart, which craft a soundscape for each moment in time. Moran is passionate about the power of words and ideas in tangling our relationship with Earth. Moran’s is a 2021 Tasmanian finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam, and their spoken word poems arise from an intimate immersion with the world’s soul.  
Kris Schaffer is an indigenous horticulturalist, bush food expert, consultant and artist amongst many things, with a life-time’s experience of being creatively embedded in nature. Kris has been welcoming people to this land since she was a child, and it’s second nature to continue sharing the knowledge she’s collected along the way. She is passionate about creating sacred truth-telling circles, being an integral part of the “Walking Humbly” and “Healing the Land, Healing the People” projects.
Kris looks forward to working together with her indigenous community and with all diverse cultures who call Tasmania home.
Dr Sue Stack is an artist, educator, and writer experienced in holistic and transformative learning. Her passion is creating learning environments that enable people to access their deeper wisdom through embodied, earth-based and creative experiences, inviting empathy, new ways of seeing and authentic expression.  She is interested in deep listening and healing of land through music, art, improvisation, story telling, ritual  and energy work.  She has devised and facilitated for 8 years a collective healing improvisation practice: Embodied Wisdom and Play. https://suestack.wordpress.com/about/
"Colonisation has harmed so many countless beings. We need to honour and respect these harms, and find our own way of connecting to place"
"The music we make shares an essence. An essence of enspiralling with the earth, with Country, with all that is."
Picture
Growing Awara - Sowing Seeds; Janurary 2020
"enspiralling"
​reflections by Sue Stack
We sit. We soften into our breathing and allow our bodies to sink into the soil. We listen.

We hear the wind and the birds, the drone of traffic and we go deeper. Something opens up in us. A quietness. And we need to breathe this out. With the trees and with the place.

We ask permission to be here. We call on the ancestors and the spirits of the place. Gently.  We call on light, love and life to support us all. We breathe that in.

The conversation begins. We gently pick up our instruments, feeling into the voice of the place. We are the breeze that comes in waves. We are the call of frogs and crickets. We are the soft song of the trees sharing their lives.

We find in many places this first movement is a soundscape – the breath in. We are gently acknowledging and mirroring what is around. We know we are beginning to be in dialogue when birds fly through the trees near us or call out, when a swoop of wind rustles the trees and they share their voice.

The second movement is often more playful. There is a feeling that the place is delighting in us being there and wants to play with rhythm and sound. We are often moved to make percussion on our bodies, on objects around, to stamp our feet and to use our voice. This seems to be the breath out – the creative urge that is a collaboration that is bigger than ourselves. Now the kookaburras come and laugh with us.

Each movement opens a new doorway into experiencing the place and being in dialogue with it. At the end we feel deeply nourished in our souls and in deeper relationship to the place. It feels we have honoured the place and it feels enlivened through this co-participation in musical creation.

Some places have histories and energies which are disturbed or stuck. They might call us for healing. The sound that comes from these places can at first seem sad or distorted -  a lament. There is a need to  honour the grief and pain and find ways to express it. There is a moment when something shifts and something new is being birthed. It is a privilege to be part of that and to feel into the gifts the place offers.
  I live, work, and play on the stolen lands of the muwinina/palawa/pakana peoples in nipaluna, lutruwita/truwanna (so-called Hobart, Tasmania). I acknowledge that genocide is ongoing, and sovereignty has never been ceded. I acknowledge the sacredness of this land, and pay deepest respects to the past, present, and emerging custodians of these lands and waters. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

ENQUIRIES
0407 262 399
MORAN.WIESEL@ICLOUD.COM